website

I know this isn’t very new, but I wanted to post for the sake of anyone who hasn’t happened across the site yet.

TheSelby.com is an amazing look into the workspaces and homes of some of the best creative professionals in the world. Be sure to grab the RSS feed from the link in the left-hand column. (They don’t have the site setup to do RSS auto-discovery)

On December 17th (two days from when I’m writing this) I’ll be walking across the stage at North Carolina State University to recieve my undergraduate degree in Industrial Design. That’s sort of relevant to this post, but I also just like how the words look when I type it out.

While searching for the best way to get my career started I want to make sure that my portfolio website is going to communicate my work in an interesting but unobtrusive way. I’ve always felt that a good portfolio website should have very little that gets in the way of the actual work, but of course it still needs to be fun and easy to use. I’ve been using SlideshowPro for Flash along with Director to handle the back-end of uploading, resizing, organizing, and displaying my portfolio images and videos. The combination has been great.

I found a great example of how to use external elements in the flash document to load the gallery thumbnails into a filmstrip navigation bar. If you own SlideshowPro, you can find it on the downloads page. I spent some time with the action script and adapted it to fit my site. I think the result is a much cleaner and intuitive interface. I have a couple more bugs I’m trying to hunt down in the actionscript, and I am going to make the type more consistant, but I think it’s a decent start.

The artist, Sam, takes e-mails that he receives from the site’s viewers and turns them into drawings. They are extremely simple line drawings with solid shading, but the amount of expression and emotion he is able to convey is always incredible. Sometimes they look like the doodles of a 6 year old, but the details in the characters like weight and posture, combined with the compositions, prove to me that there’s a lot more going on in this artist’s head. The expression he gets out of the eyes alone, which look like random circles but always seem to show the right expression, astounds me. He has also been doing this for years. But maybe I’m just easily entertained. Here are a couple of my favorites.